Trans, L’Origine du Monde

April 11 - May 24 2025

Rhyme and Reason Museum- 131 W San Francisco St, Santa Fe, New Mexico

The Rhyme and Reason Museum is thrilled to present Trans, L’Origine du Monde, the debut solo exhibition by Char Klein. This powerful body of work explores gender, identity, and the ways we see and interpret the body through history and art.

With Trans L’Origine du Monde, Klein engages with one of art history’s most enduring images: Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde. While Courbet’s painting presents the female body as an immutable symbol, Klein challenges this assumption, reframing the body as fluid, shifting, and open to reinterpretation. Their subjects—non-binary and trans-masculine individuals—adopt poses reminiscent of classical painting, but through Klein’s lens, these familiar gestures take on new meaning, questioning the deeply embedded links between anatomy, identity, and perception.

Klein asks: How do we look, and what have we been conditioned to see? Their photographs occupy the space between certainty and ambiguity, pushing against the rigid expectations of traditional representation. Rather than providing definitive answers, Klein’s work embraces contradiction and transformation, inviting the viewer to reconsider what is natural, constructed, or imagined.

Rendered with striking composition and masterful use of light, each image is both intimate and expansive. Klein’s photographs challenge fixed realities, asserting presence while dismantling assumptions. Their work reminds us that history isn’t static—it evolves, shaped by those who dare to reimagine it.

Enhancing the experience, the exhibition’s opening night and closing reception will feature a live violin performance by Jack Boaz, who will debut an original composition inspired by Klein’s work. This collaboration deepens the exhibition’s themes of transformation and reinterpretation across artistic disciplines.

A milestone for both Klein and the Rhyme and Reason Museum, Trans, L’Origine du Monde positions the artist as a vital voice in contemporary photography and signals the museum’s ambition to foster critical conversations in the art world.

Didactic by Delaney Hoffman 

There are some photographs that catch a static reality and there are others, like those within Char Klein’s Trans, L’Origine du Monde that push the world further into a constantly shifting mystery. Traditionally, the relationship between the artist and the muse is not mysterious; the opposing positions of the Cock (Artist) and Pussy (Subject) in the rich palettes of Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet or any number of French realist and surrealist painters were always obvious. Western ideas of photography are built on these thinly veiled assertions of power- echoed predatory dynamics between the maker and the muse, and elsewhere, but the camera is a responsive and nimble tool that is not limited by its history. The camera has always been capable of communicating and complicating so much more.

Outside of painters like Courbet and Manet, Klein also shares a French lineage with the Surrealist self-portraitist Claude Cahun, who used the image making process as an engine for re-invention as she worked collaboratively with her lover, Marcel Moore, to birth a new self into the world through pictures. This legacy has since been pushed forward by artists like Catherine Opie, April Dawn Alison, Laura Aguilar and Elle Pérez. To make a photograph is to build a parallel realm where externally imposed rules (of gender, of sex, of violence) can be suspended, allowing the photographer, subject, and viewer to reimagine and rewrite them in the name of liberation and self-discovery.

Klein’s photographs are not “straight”. Instead, they’re curved, hard silicone. They’re tangled, bloody records of transformation and invention, with every horizon complicated by rolling hills or substituted entirely with soft, giving dirt. While the artist operates broadly within the conventions of photography as a discipline, the form of the Subject is fundamentally altered, sometimes surgically and other times perceptively, and serves to harness the fundamental unreality of gendered forms. Klein shows us the expansiveness of the body in broad daylight, laid out under a stark sun and yelling loudly, sounding out the uncanny joys of love and desire.